Miguel Yumbo & son, Jairo

Jairo Yumbo, pictured at age nine, on the Via Auca road in front of his home in Rumipamba.

Testimonial of Miguel Yumbo, of Rumipamba

My name is Miguel Yumbo and I’m from the Quichua indigenous nation. I have three sons, the middle one is Jairo. He was born with a deformed hand.

When I came to the Amazon with my family in 1982 the Via Auca [the dirt highway] was already here, and so was [Texaco Auca Sur] oil well #1, about two miles from here. Two open waste pits were also near the house.

I’m a farmer and I grow coffee and cacao. We get our drinking water from a stream about 100 yards from the house, next to the highway and we bathe there too. We’ve seen crude in the water. During the winter rains, the crude disappears, but in summer, it stays there. We push the crude aside, and gather up the clean water underneath to drink.

I couldn’t be at the hospital in Coca when Jairo was born because I was working. When he was 8 days old, I went back to the hospital and talked to the doctors. They told me that the petroleum caused his hand to be like that, because we had always drank water from an oil-filled stream, and because Texaco used to pass by our house spraying crude on the dirt highway.

Until three years ago, they were still spraying the roads with oil. We’d walk on that, the kids barefoot, and it would make us sick.

I took Jairo to the oil company’s medical clinic, and they said that his hand had nothing to do with the oil, that it was a result of a medicine we took to stop having children. We never took any medicine, but I preferred not to say anything; I just left. The oil company people always became angry if we said anything or complained.

At school, the kids tease Jairo and laugh at him. Sometimes he wears a long-sleeved shirt to cover his hand.

The doctors told me to bring Jairo back to the hospital when he was 6, but I didn’t because I’ve never had enough money. I’m thinking of taking him to the hospital in a few years for an operation, when I have a job and can save money.

I Stand with Steven

I Stand with Steven

Pledge:

I support attorney Steven Donziger and Ecuadorian advocates Javier Piaguaje and Hugo Camacho in their efforts to hold Chevron accountable for its devastation of farmer and indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. I call on Chevron to end its attacks against human rights lawyers, activists, and the communities of Ecuador who continue to demand Chevron meet its legal, moral, and ethical responsibilities and clean up its toxic waste in Ecuador.

During more than two decades of oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Chevron admitted to discharging billions of gallons of toxic water into the rainforest, leaving local people suffering from an epidemic of cancer, miscarriages and birth defects. The affected indigenous and farmer communities have fought back with the help of a committed local legal effort, grassroots activism, and the tireless efforts of lawyers from around the world, including New York-based human rights lawyer Steven Donziger.

Chevron spent nine years arguing in United States Federal Court that the case against it should be heard in Ecuador. After being found liable for $19 billion in damages in the very Ecuadorian Court chosen by the company, Chevron responded by filing a retaliatory suit against Steven Donziger, Ecuadorian lawyer and advocate Pablo Fajardo, Goldman Prize winner Luis Yanza, and all 47 of their named clients in the very venue Chevron deemed inappropriate when the case was originally brought.

Chevron’s abusive legal strategy flies in the face of everything that our justice system and indeed our Constitution holds dear. For these reasons I support the fight of Steven Donziger, Javier Piaguaje, and Hugo Camacho and their colleagues to hold Chevron accountable for its contamination in Ecuador and the abuses of our justice system.